The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Ford’s Four Principles of Service
The last part of the following paragraph ties in again with the Mandate 
of Heaven: “Everyone who is connected with us—either as a manager, 
worker, or purchaser—is the better for our existence. The institution that 
we have erected is performing a service.” The leader and organization jus-
tify their existence through service to all stakeholders.
* * *
The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery of 
true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due largely 
to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing of it. Greed 
is merely a species of nearsightedness. I have striven toward manufactur-
ing with a minimum of waste, both of materials and of human effort, and 
then toward distribution at a minimum of profit, depending for the total 

---

lii  •  Henry Ford’s Introduction
profit upon the volume of distribution. In the process of manufacturing I 
want to distribute the maximum of wage—that is, the maximum of buying 
power. Since also this makes for a minimum cost and we sell at a mini-
mum profit, we can distribute a product in consonance with buying power. 
Thus everyone who is connected with us—either as a manager, worker, or 
purchaser—is the better for our existence. The institution that we have 
erected is performing a service. That is the only reason I have for talking 
about it. The principles of that service are these:
  1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One 
who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is 
only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no dis-
grace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past 
is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.
  2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the 
one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another 
man—criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain 
the condition of one’s fellow man—to rule by force instead of by 
intelligence.
  3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business can-
not extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit. 
Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but 
profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It 
cannot be the basis—it must be the result of service.
  4. Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process of 
buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, 
transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving it 
to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only 
to clog this progression.
How all of this arose, how it has worked out, and how it applies generally 
are the subjects of these chapters.

---

1
1
The Beginning of Business
This chapter describes how Ford got into business, and cites some of the 
early influences on his thought processes. The previous chapter discussed 
how his observation of farm work awakened him to the enormous amount 
of waste that can be built into a job, and this chapter discusses the agricul-
tural influences even further. Note Ford’s observation that the hand labor 
on farms did not deliver commensurate results.
* * *
On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. 
It is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work 
on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring 
of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and they 
always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world in the 
appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construc-
tion and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously alike—
except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have not yet 
quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though 
it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty 
miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day 
as the day it was built. The development in methods of manufacture and 
in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. The 
whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is the “Model 
T,” has four cylinders and a self starter—it is in every way a more conve-
nient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost 
every point in it may be found also in the first car. The changes have been 
brought about through experience in the making and not through any 
change in the basic principle—which I take to be an important fact dem-
onstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate 
on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. One idea at a time is 
about as much as any one can handle.

---

2  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
It was life on the farm that drove me into devising ways and means to 
better transportation. I was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, 
Michigan, and my earliest recollection is that, considering the results, there 
was too much work on the place. That is the way I still feel about farming. 
There is a legend that my parents were very poor and that the early days 
were hard ones. Certainly they were not rich, but neither were they poor. As 
Michigan farmers went, we were prosperous. The house in which I was born 
is still standing, and it and the farm are part of my present holding.
There was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of 
the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be 
done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics—although my 
mother always said that I was born a mechanic. I had a kind of workshop 
with odds and ends of metal for tools before I had anything else. In those 
days we did not have the toys of to-day; what we had were home made. My 
toys were all tools—they still are! And every fragment of machinery was a 
treasure.